Word: gustloff
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Crabwalk (Harcourt; 234 pages) tells the story of a journalist, Paul Pokriefke, who was born as his mother escaped the sinking Wilhelm Gustloff, a cruise ship carrying refugees that was sunk by a Russian submarine in the Baltic Sea in January 1945. The number of those who died will never be known, though around 7,000 seems a reasonable guess. It was the greatest disaster in maritime history...
Grass had long wanted to write about the Wilhelm Gustloff, he says, partly because his own family could easily have been on the ship. His mother was never able to talk to him about what she experienced when the Russians moved into Danzig. "There is no family in Germany that did not learn some kind of lesson from the two World Wars," says Grass. In Crabwalk, a character based on Grass--himself a man of the left--laments the "staggering failure" of the left's silence in the face of such misery. That silence is ending...
...question of German victimhood has been much-discussed all year. This past spring, Nobel prizewinning novelist Günter Grass published Im Krebsgang (Crab Walk), a novella about the millions who perished on the eastern front and in particular the 1945 sinking in the Baltic Sea of the Wilhelm Gustloff, when as many as 9,000 lives were lost. The debate about the novel soon centered on the political correctness of dealing in literary form with the once-taboo suffering of German wartime refugees fleeing from the Red Army. Even beyond the similar, painful debate it has caused, Der Brand...
Engel's trial, expected to begin in May or June, comes at a time when new attention has been focused on the war years by a book, Crab Walk, by Nobel-prizewinning author Günter Grass. The work deals with the 1945 sinking of the ship Wilhelm Gustloff by a Russian submarine as it steamed from Danzig (present day Gdansk, Poland) back to Germany. More than 7,000 passengers, mostly German women and children, drowned in the incident. The book, which tops best-seller lists in Germany, has sold more than 300,000 copies and has inspired front-page...
...waters, but no more. It was the worst peacetime maritime disaster of the century, exceeding the record of the Titanic, which went down in 1912 with some 1,500 on board. The worst shipping calamity occurred during World War II, when a Soviet submarine torpedoed the Nazi transport Wilhelm Gustloff, killing an estimated 7,700. While more than 1,600 people, including eleven crewmen from the Victor, were presumed dead in last week's accident, the actual count was almost certainly higher. The names of as many as 1,000 children may not have been included on the ferry...